Comment by skissane
2 days ago
To be charitable to its original designers, information was much less easily accessible in the 1960s than today-although the shunting yard algorithm had been published in the research literature in 1961, practitioners working 5-6 years later may plausibly have been unaware of it-it wasn’t like nowadays where they could easily discover it in Wikipedia or by asking an LLM.
Yeah, that's fair enough. I'm sure a lot of weird / bad language design choices can be chalked up to this (COBOL...). Now that C and Pascal derived languages have been around for a long time, even if you don't know about how parsers work, everyone knows that certain syntax / semantics are at least possible since they're the norm, and I suppose that wasn't the case back then.